There is a popular recipe for Spicy, Garlicy Cashew Chicken that appeared in the NYT. Basically, the recipe calls for marinating and then grilling chicken in a paste of cashews, lime, jalapeno pepper, oil, garlic, soy sauce and brown sugar. I made the recipe (using boneless dark meat chicken), and the cashew paste very much reminded me of coated kale chips.

I got the idea of using the sauce to make vegetable skewers using broccoli and red pepper. I parboiled broccoli, tossed it with olive oil and salt and pepper and then coated it with the cashew paste. The broccoli was then grilled (I used a George Foreman grill). The results were fantastic. The nut mixture got crisp in spots and remained soft in spots. It added the kind of varied texture and savory intensity to the broccoli that a cheese topping usually does.

Anyway . . . . fast forward to this week. I ask my husband if he would like the cashew sauce on grilled green beans and he said “YES!” before I could even finish my sentence. This cashew sauce inspires that kind of enthusiasm.

Note: I grilled the green beans, but I think roasting the green beans would also work.

This is my vegetarian version of the famous Wick Fowler’s chili, which can be made from the original recipe (which calls for the boxed mix), from the many copycat recipes online (like this or this, or this or this) or from the current instructions appearing on the boxed mix. I’ve tweaked the recipe to suit my tastes and to make it work with beans or soy crumbles. You could also use real ground beef (use 2 lbs.), but you will need to take extra time to brown the ground beef and drain off excess fat.

Wick Fowler, in case you are curious, was a journalist, war correspondent and chili aficionado. He started selling his chili mix in 1964, a few years before helping to start an annual chili cook-off in Texas which ended up eventually morphing into two cook-offs (the convoluted history of the Terlingua chili cook-offs, both the original Terlingua Championship and that of the Chili Appreciation Society International can be found here).

Real chili aficionados would be appalled by the idea of a vegetarian chili, especially one seasoned as mildly as mine. All the same, my family and friends love this recipe.

Have you seen okra in the market and wondered what to do with it? Wonder no more–this is my favorite way to make okra.

This recipe started off a little different. A friend from Texas explained to me that the Soul Food way to make okra was to saute onion, garlic and green pepper, then add okra and tomato sauce. I heard from someone from India that a good way to make okra is to marinate it first with garlic, lemon and oil and then fry it. I combined the two ideas and ended up with something that resembles the Middle Eastern way of cooking okra with a lemony tomato sauce.

The difference between my recipe and the usual bamia recipe is the step of marinating the okra before cooking it. I think this improves the texture of the okra. It definitely gets the lemon garlic flavor all the way into the okra, which is a good thing in itself. It is generally believed that adding acid like lemon to okra and frying it prevents that slippery texture okra is known for sometimes getting.